1. Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.

― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

2. In general, if any branch of trade, or any division of labour, be advantageous to the public, the freer and more general the competition, it will always be the more so.

― Adam Smith

3. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

― Adam Smith

4. Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

― Adam Smith

5. The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.

― Adam Smith

6. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.

― Adam Smith

7. Modern critics of the Conquest have an unlikely ally in the eighteenth-century prophet of laissez-faire economics: "It is not by the importation of gold and silver, that the discovery of America has enriched Europe. ...The commodities of Europe were almost all new to America, and many of those of America were new to Europe. A new set of exchanges, therefore, began t o take place which had never been thought of before, and which should naturally have proved as advantageous to the new, as it certainly did to the old continent. The savage injustice of the Europeans rendered an event, which ought to have been beneficial to all, ruinous and destructive to several of those unfortunate countries.

― Adam Smith

8. Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.

― Adam Smith

9. It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit.

― Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

10. How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

― Adam Smith

11. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

― Adam Smith

12. With the great part of rich people, the chief employment of riches consists in the parade of riches.

― Adam Smith

13. We are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.

― Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

14. Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state…